


Project Noah

by websandwhiskers



Category: The Avengers (2012), Thor (2011), Walking Dead (TV)
Genre: AU, Culture Shock, F/M, Gen, Gore, Zombie Apocalypse, badassery, fusion fic, what happens after you don't save the world
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2012-04-26
Updated: 2012-05-02
Packaged: 2017-11-04 08:12:12
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 3
Words: 4,920
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/391676
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/websandwhiskers/pseuds/websandwhiskers
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"We've already lost,” Jane says, just to hear the words out loud.  “We're not looking for aid.  We're looking for a place to evacuate.”</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. The End of the World

**Author's Note:**

> So this is sort of a Walking Dead fusion, maybe, kinda? I am not dead set on whether a crossover, just yet. If any 'Walking Dead' characters appear, it will not be for a while.
> 
> Also, fair warning that I'm trying to do about three real-life-money-earning jobs at the moment, so updates will be few and far between, if they happen at all. Get attached to this story at your own risk.

“Jane, something seriously fucked up is going on,” are the first words out of Darcy's mouth.

“Well it had better be, because you are two hours late,” Jane snaps into the phone, while _making her own coffee,_ and why are there no clean mugs? She could swear she did dishes just the other day – while the data she recovered on Tuesday was collating, which was only . . . she looks over at Erik's quote-of-the-day calendar, the one he insisted on getting her and tacking up next to the coffee maker so she would, quote, “maintain some semblance of connection with the world”. 

It's apparently Monday again. That would explain the lack of mugs. Not so much the lack of Darcy. “Elaborate on 'seriously fucked up'.” There's a faint smell of smoke wafting in from somewhere, despite that the windows are closed.

“I think it's maybe the zombie apocalypse.” 

Jane blinks at a not-too-dirty-maybe-passable-she-has-a-good-immune-system-anyway mug. “Darcy-”

“No, I'm totally dead serious here, my neighbor just tried to like, eat me. In the bad way. Of course considering she's like sixty and had questionable personal hygiene even before her presumed un-death, anything would be the bad way, but – yeah. My neighbor, zombified. I've got my cheap-as-shit Ikea dresser in front of the door, and I'm not thinking that's gonna hold long.” 

Jane puts the mug down. “Did you go out last night? Are you still drunk? Oh my god, did someone put something in your drink?”

“What?” No, I am not roofied, Jane, I'm -”

“Don't move, I'm coming to get you,” Jane says decisively, in her best non-panicked, soothing voice. She glances briefly down at her clothes, realizes she hasn't actually changed them all weekend and that she probably smells, but tells herself firmly that the ER will not care, and neither will Darcy. 

“If you try to come get me, my neighbor is going to have you for lunch!” Darcy shouts into the phone; Jane winces, and loses a guilty argument with herself over whether it makes her a terrible, terrible person to set last night's figures to running before she goes to get her poor drugged friend. Intern. Poor dependent fellow woman in need and Jane is so very going to hell, but it's only a few keystrokes and she doesn't believe in hell anyway. 

“Jane. Listen to me. You're at the lab, right? Do not leave the lab. What you need to do is call SHIELD, get them to send people with guns. Lots of guns. All the guns.” 

“Okay, Darcy,” Jane says absently, tapping a last key and then spinning around looking for her keys. On the hook by the door? Of course not. “Just stay there.”

“You're not listening to me!” Darcy screams. “I do not want to have to stick a bread knife through your eye when you become the hungry dead, Jane!” 

“That's not going to happen.” Jane murmurs, tossing papers every which way; how can she possibly lose her keys this often? She found a whole other civilization on another form of celestial body that isn't even a planet and thus, she discovered that too – point being, she should be able to find her damn keys in an _emergency_. What if atmospheric conditions were coalescing so as to be favorable for an event _right now,_ and she couldn't find her keys? 

. . not that she wants Darcy waiting.

“Look, forget it, okay?” Darcy's saying. “I'll be fine. I'll call a cab.”

“There's no cab service in this town,” Jane reminds her. Her toe hits something that jingles as she scurries between tables – which points out that, crap, she's not wearing shoes – but, keys! 

“Just don't come looking for me, I couldn't live with it if you got zombified trying to come get me!” Darcy pleads. 

“Alright,” Jane lies blithely, even as she shoves her feet into one of the many pairs of discarded shoes occupying the space under her desk – they may actually be Darcy's shoes – and heads for the door. 

Just in time to see the guy who runs the gas station down the street fling himself bodily against her window, teeth snapping at the glass, the left side of his neck mostly missing and his head hanging at an unnatural angle. 

Jane screams and drops the phone. 

“Jane? Jane!” Darcy's voice echoes up from the floor. “Don't let them bite you! Aim for the head!” 

The man at the window paws at the glass, teeth making high screeching sounds against it, hands leaving unsteady smears of blood. Three of his fingers are missing on the right. His eyes are glazed. 

Pupils fixed and dilated. 

She can see the dangling end of a very large vein coming out of his neck. It's not spurting. It's not even gushing. It's sort of . . . dripping. 

Her fingers shake, and it takes her three tries to get the phone back up to her ear, Darcy screaming survival tips between frantic calls of her name. 

“There's a dead guy at the window,” Jane says faintly.

“I told you!” shrieks Darcy. 

“I should call SHIELD,” Jane says.

“You think?” Darcy echoes. 

“Why didn't you call SHIELD?” 

“Because I called _you,_ dumbass, I know you're not genre-savvy enough to survive without me!” 

“Thank you,” Jane replies with feeling. She's vaguely aware of the sound of an approaching helicopter.

“Jane? Are you going all traumatic-shock-ish on me? Hold it together, girl.”

“Don't call me girl, I'm your boss,” Jane objects. The helicopter is getting very loud. “I'm going to hang up and call -”

And then the guy outside the window's head explodes. 

Jane does some more screaming, and so does Darcy, and then there's a red-haired woman in a black body suit dropping down a zip line and making extremely short work of the very expensive lock on the front door. 

“Dr. Foster?” the woman asks. Jane stares. The woman's eyes dart to the screaming phone on the floor; she strides over and picks it up.

“Miss Lewis? Yes. Yes. 10 minutes,” she says, then disconnects the call, hands the phone to Jane, and says, “You're being evacuated.” 

“I – what -” Jane stammers. 

The redhead looks at her like she's considering the need for sedation, which snaps Jane out of it. “My equipment -”

“Can be replicated much more easily than can you,” the redhead snaps. “Come on.” 

And Jane comes on, which involves being towed by harness up into the waiting chopper while the terrifying woman who's just rescued her takes down six more of Jane's former neighbors, who have begun converging on the noise. The smell of smoke is strong outside, though she can't spot the source of the fire. Jane thinks she can hear distant screaming before the sound of the spinning blades drowns out everything. 

The redhead introduces herself as Agent Romanov; the equally terrifying man hanging out the side of the chopper and shooting  _exploding arrows_ into the rapidly-growing crowd below them is Agent Barton. The pilot doesn't introduce herself, though she's busy on the phone using words like “asset retrieved”. 

Jane is momentarily indignant at being an asset; then Romanov says, “You're just wasting ammo, Barton, this place is done,” and Jane decides maybe she can live with asset-hood. Her mind starts spinning to everyone she's interacted with in this tiny town in the last several years, most of them familiar faces whose names she never bothered to know. A good percentage of the shuffling hoard below them are children, she can see that before they're taking to the sky.

“Darcy -” Jane begins frantically as they lift off.

“We're retrieving her next,” Romanov interrupts, while Barton retreats more securely into the chopper and begins doing something fussy with his bow; Jane knows nothing about bows, but she knows the look of someone who's ten seconds from losing it. It makes her spontaneously like him. 

“And Erik – Dr. Selvig -” 

Romanov's face goes even further blank. 

“No,” Jane says, flatly, like the vehemence of her tone can change things. The words haven't been said yet. It's not real yet. 

Romanov just looks pointedly out the open side of the chopper.

From the altitude they've attained, Jane can see the row of newly-built condos where Erik was renting, on the outskirts of town – developers hoping to convince someone this backwater could be tranquilly trendy.

It's burning. No, it's burnt. The homes are just blackened beams. Nothing is moving but the last dregs of flame. There's another chopper retreating from the area.

“He could have gotten out!” Jane screams, over the sound of the blades. They're all screaming, really, to be heard – some of them are just screaming more calmly than others.

“He didn't,” Romanov says flatly. “Beta Team confirmed.”

Jane just stares at her. No one tells you that someone's dead that way. No one. It can't be real, because no one -

“At least you know he's not still out there,” Barton offers her, shooting Romanov a look – at which Romanov blinks, unimpressed. “That he had a clean death.”

“Fire?” Jane asks, overwhelmed, horrified, unable to believe she's having this conversation. She's going to wake up. “You think burning alive is a good way to go?” 

It's one of those dreams where you think you woke up and started your day, but then the alarm goes off. Any second now the sunlight will hit her eyes through the window and she'll realize she's drooled another keyboard into uselessness. She has to.

Barton and Romanov exchange looks. They open their mouths simultaneously.

“Nat-” Barton begins.

“Dr. Selvig was infected,” Romanov says, perhaps a fraction more gently than she's been speaking. Maybe Jane's expression is as unreal as she feels. “Beta Team took him down. We wouldn't leave one of our own like that.” 

“You couldn't just leave it?” Barton says. “Jesus, Nat.” 

“She deserves the truth,” Romanov says, eyes still on Jane. 

Ten numb minutes later they're pulling Darcy and her backpack of canned goods out of her window. Darcy flings herself at Jane; Jane's arms go around her automatically, but weakly, like she'd sort of forgotten she had limbs. Darcy pulls back, face tear-streaked but jaw firm. “Hey,” she says, smiling a reasonable facsimile of her usual shit-eating grin. “It's gonna be okay – okay? We're gonna make it. We're the survivors, I mean, dude, you're a crazy scientist. Your survival is all but guaranteed, here. We're gonna be fine.” 

Jane stares. 

Darcy bites her lip and says, “Jane?”

Jane looks at her. 

Darcy curls up next to her, pulling Jane's legs across her bent knees and Jane's head into her chest. She begins stroking Jane's hair, gently, like Jane's mother used to do. Before she died.

***

“How long will it take you to re-create a working Bifrost?” are the first words out of Director Fury's mouth. They've landed on a helicarrier. Jane didn't know helicarriers existed. “Assume funds and resources are not an object. This is now our one and only priority.” 

“Dude, why aren't the _zombies_ the priority?” Darcy interjects, before Jane can even think of a response. “I mean, sure, god-like warrior vikings would be useful and all, but . . . “ 

Director Fury is silent in a way that is an answer in and of itself.

“Because it's global already, isn't it? We've already lost,” Jane says, just to hear the words out loud. “Because we're not looking for aid. We're looking for a place to evacuate.” 

“Earth as we knew it is, for the time being, fatally compromised,” Fury affirms. 

Jane thinks the words sound wrong, too calm, too matter-of-fact, but then thinks – how should the words sound? No one has ever had to say those words before. 

“Dr. Foster, Ms. Lewis, your project is our last chance of salvaging something of our culture and biodiversity elsewhere. I have teams around the globe at this moment, retrieving . . what they can.”

“Noah's Ark,” Jane whispers. 

“Call the project whatever you want,” Fury replies. “Just get to work. The human race ran out of time yesterday.” 


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So, we're ignoring Norse mythology (well, tipping a hat to it a tiny, tiny bit, but really mostly ignoring it) and going with movie!verse Loki here entirely. There is no mention of movie-Loki having had children. Yeah, there's a horse with extra legs in there, but we're letting that one go. 
> 
> It should also perhaps be noted at this juncture that I don't see this being a story with a cohesive beginning, middle, and end, so much as a series of episodes occuring in the same 'verse along a rough timeline.

Loki finds the chaos into which Miguard has descended _fascinating._

He'd had plans – possibilities, ideas hanging in the air, waiting for the sudden tip of circumstance to decide which would be best. And then – this. He is not too proud to admit he never foresaw _this_.

Of course he's only admitting it to himself, so perhaps pride doesn't really enter into it.

In this chaos, the possibilities are literally endless. He makes a few half-hearted attempts to cure Midguard's plague - and if it enters his mind that the saving of a world might make up for the attempted destruction of another, he doesn't let himself think it very long before he abandons his present experiment, finds some band of utter degenerates who have somehow managed to endure, and condemns them to a grisly death. He doesn't kill anyone outright – really, what's the point, anymore? But it's more than that.

A creaking hinge, a change in the direction of the wind . . . things that require little to no magic, and might well have happened without his interference. These are his tools. Because when he finds those worthy of the fate of this world, he doesn't want them to know an erstwhile god of mischief has marked them for punishment. He wants them to go to their deaths uncomprehending, with the taste of their own ultimate failure bitter on their tongues, with the belief that some undefined and unknowable power of fate has found them wanting, and extraneous.

He fails, regardless, at curing this thing the humans have unleashed upon themselves. This is a monster of science, not magic, and while he suspects with a few centuries to study their arts he could well correct their error, Loki expects to be bored of all this much more quickly than that.

He whispers differing strategies in the ears of a dozen rulers and watches them play out, noting what is effective, what is useless to the point of farce, who hangs themselves in their closet and who shoots their mistress to spare her the suffering. He has, after all, spent a lifetime studying statecraft, and when will such a perfect to put theory to the test ever again present itself? It's an chance not to be wasted.

And if he thinks of Heimdall looking down and reporting all this to his – to Odin, for once trapped and helpless and unable to ride to the rescue, he does not let himself wonder if his hand will be seen. If his carelessness with lives and nations will be held as a mark against him (though it was never so for Thor), if the peoples and places who survive a little better for his interference will be counted in his favor. If he is seen at all. If he is missed at all.

The band of warriors to whom Thor's lady gives aid, he does not touch. Not a whisper, not a breath. Once he had considered – but not now. They are surviving on their own, and perhaps that marks them worthy, at least, of being left alone.

And then there is a sound.

He stands in what was once one of the finest cities of Midguard, opulent beyond all reason and no less mortal for it. Not far from the place where the Bifrost used to touch down (and if he finds himself there too often for chance, he doesn't think on that either).

A crying.

It is coming from a vehicle. Loki circles it slowly, trying to make sense of the sound. The high street is deserted, littered with such vehicles, the horde that had overtaken this place long since gone – in the main, at least. He can hear other sounds answering that first sound. Stirrings. Moans. A few remain.

From what he'd been able to observe of Midguard in normalcy, before the plague, this was a vehicle favored by those of some means. Its doors are open, and though there's blood and bits of flesh splattered on the outside edge of one of the seats, the interior is mostly clean. The glass is unbroken.

It was abandoned, not overtaken.

Probably in the screaming chaos, the cries of one small being were drowned out, until it had screamed itself into exhaustion. Into fitful sleep.

Or perhaps there's simply no sense in it at all.

There is a child still alive in the back of the vehicle, strapped into a harness, face red with its cries and the heat. Loki knows little of the lives of mortals, but this one cannot have been born long ago. It is so small, its near-boiling head covered with the finest dusting of dark hair, soft beneath his fingers.

It stops its wailing at his touch. Hiccups. Blinks red-rimmed eyes at him. Its small arms wave.

Loki lets the child catch one finger.

The vehicle was _abandoned_.

It should be enough to convince him of the utter worthlessness of the human race.

Instead he finds himself unfastening the child's harness and summoning a bit of ice at the tip of one finger. He slips his finger into the tiny mouth, and it sucks greedily, at the liquid and at the cold. “Hush,” he murmurs.

The child releases his finger and squawls, but briefly, before it's rooting for it again.

A touch of magic turns icewater to milk. A hand brushed over the small belly brings its dangerous temperature down. The same hand, carelessly outflung, turns the approaching undead into piles of ash.

Loki touches the child's face carefully; a girl, he's realized by now, as his magic makes careful repairs to what the heat has damaged. Even had she not woken, not cried out, not fallen victim to the endless hunger of the dead, she would have joined them soon.

_Abandoned._

Loki does not want to think of Odin staring down at a small blue face, one eye a bloody ruin and thus suddenly deprived of the ability to perceive depth. Distance. Perspective. Such an easy thing, if one knows how, to turn Jotunn to Aesir, in all the ways that would matter to most.

Such an easy thing to brush away mortality, to remake in one's own image. How much of the core is left, after such a thing?

Enough to understand the loss.

“Hush, my daughter,” Loki tells the newly immortal babe, and brings her carefully up to his chest, tucking the small head against his shoulder. She snuffles and settles, warm and damp and living against him, a somehow perfect weight.

He had never given much thought to children, to heirs and legacy beyond what had been denied to him. Now, knowing what he does, he is unsure such a thing is even possible for him – could his seed take root in a woman of the Aesir? He would not consider that he might find a bride among the Jotunn.

But this child . . . this is a true child of his line. Abandoned, remade, born of despair and death. And selfishness. Born of Hel. There is suddenly a reason and a pattern and a sense to the chaos that delivered him to this exact place, this moment.

And Loki finds himself feeling much less complacent about the loss of this world.

***


	3. Chapter 3

The majority of Natasha's vast and carefully cultivated skill-set is utterly useless in this new world. 

People have not changed - deceit remains an inoperable cancer of the human condition. But cancer is just a failed form of mutation, and subterfuge as Natasha employed it was art. This mattered to her; not just that she maintain her trademark deadly efficiency, be it in espionage or in combat, but that what she did was a thing in which she could take pride. She may have served more than one master in her time, but she never feared to answer to herself. She couldn't have been what she was, without that.

What she was. 

Natasha is curled into a ventilation shaft, face toward the grate and sucking what little fetid air she can through the crush of corpses pressed against it. Slowly, curiously, she pokes one finger into the nearest one's eye. 

It doesn't flinch. It lets her fingernail slice through its clouded cornea in a gush of foul, clouded liquid that runs down into its still snapping teeth. It never struggles, as Natasha pushes through its eye and right into its brain. Her knuckles are pressed against the grate hard enough to hurt, to bruise, before the teeth stop snapping. 

She draws her hand back. It falls. Another is instantly in its place, all the more frantic for the thin trickle of blood her scraped knuckles left on the grate. 

Natasha wipes her hand on her pants and tries her comm again. “Widow to Iron Man, do you read, over?” 

Nothing. 

The one at the center of the grate now has no lips left. Its teeth make a bone-shivering squeal as it bites, and bites, and bites at the grate, wearing them away in thin slivers. 

“Captain Rogers, this is Widow.” 

No answer. 

Natasha sighs and rolls over, the sound of her head dropped onto the thin metal of the vent echoing. She can feel dead fingers trying to gain purchase on her hair, but slipping, no more than pulling the ends. If she could just forget about its source, the sensation itself would be soothing. When she gets out of here, she wants a massage. 

If she could stop seeing dead children come to eat her every time she closes her eyes, that would be nice too, but a massage would take the edge off.

Three weeks ago, Natasha was bitten. 

Steve refused to put a bullet between her eyes, and proved himself unnervingly efficient at disarming her. No one's ever done that before, that she can recall. For that matter, she can hand him his ass on a platter in practice. 

To her, practice and practical application aren't so far apart. To him, apparently they are. It's one of many things that digs like crawling worms in her subconscious anymore – the idea that Steve has something more to draw on, some core of impossible strength that comes only when needed, and she . . . 

. . she had a fever for two days, and then, nothing. 

It isn't like her – isn't like who she was – to be concerned about her own humanity. It's an advantage, nothing more. She is less breakable than the rest of them; no one is immune to being eaten alive, but the walking dead apparently have no interest in recruiting her. It's a novel experience, being unwanted by a force bent on taking over the world. 

One of them gets a slightly better grip on her hair. Natasha sighs, flips, and breaks its fingers. It doesn't scream, doesn't howl. No tears come into its dead eyes. She holds its gaze as it keeps dragging those fingers along the vent, still trying to grab at her, seemingly unperturbed by the fact that the contraction of its muscles and tendons is no longer having the desired effect. It is no more or less desperate than it was a moment ago. 

Because it is dead. That is how dead things are; uncaring. Unthinking. Focused. 

“Steve?” Natasha says into her comm.

There is a moment of garbled static – comforting, in its implication that he can still hit the button, at least – but that's all. 

“Widow to Iron Man.” 

From Tony, nothing at all. 

A few yards from her feet, the vent is crushed in on itself, a tangled twist of metal, completely impassable. It looks deliberate; probably the survivors, trying to eliminate access points to the interior of the building. The thinking is somewhere between prudent and paranoid – on that fine line between survival and strangling yourself in your own traps. For now, it has Natasha well and truly pinned down. 

She'll give it ten more minutes before she takes on the horde; better her than Steve, whose immunity has been theorized but not proven. When she'd hauled herself into the vent, there had been maybe fifty of them; from the sounds of it, there are more now. It's not good odds; zombies don't stun, don't choke, can't be rendered unconscious, and react to broken bones only in so far as the location of the break is such that it slows them down. 

She does not have fifty rounds left. She does have a knife. She wishes she could think of it as a challenge – and something at the base of her spine still does, cool and ready to go – but what she's thinking of is the forty-seven minutes it took them to assemble when Tony called in from aerial patrol to tell them they had heat signatures, but also an approaching horde. 

Forty-seven minutes. Thirty-two heat signatures on initial discovery. One broken door. Four heat signatures left on arrival, one questionable. 

Procedure is no advance notice of impending extraction to civilian refugees. No telling them to assemble on the roof. People try to pack things. They try to be helpful and get to higher ground. They panic and break into armed factions in fractions of an hour that slaughter each other for fear of the government they suspect is responsible for doing this to them in the first place. Twice, they've turned on them altogether, tried to take the chopper. Confusion is better.

Except they took the time to scramble two choppers, and in that time, their refugee band made their last stand against the tide, not knowing help was coming, and was reduced to a number they could have carried out in their arms. 

Natasha accepts loss of life. It's the failure, over and over and over again, the helplessness, that wears her down to this – to a Hail Mary rush and a wrong turn. 

“ -sha?” her comm buzzes. It's Steve's voice. 

“Repeat,” she snaps. 

“ -amaged. You – over?”

“You're not coming through, Captain.”

“ - lock – system. - has you. So - ove.” 

Natasha blinks, sharing a nonplussed stare with the zombie at the end of the grate. She's pretty sure that last was “move”. Do, or don't?

Presumably 'don't', as five seconds later the twisted end of the vent blows. She's thrown up against the grate, neck and shoulder hitting at a very unpleasant angle and then there are teeth in the meat of her back. Natasha curses and scrabbles for purchase against the slick metal; it takes her a disoriented second or two to brace her legs and leverage herself forward, feeling her skin tear. The thing at the grate gets a piece of her after all. 

She crawls toward the smoke, and can soon make out a metallic hand reaching in for her. It's hot, repulsors fired recently and repeatedly. The Iron Man suit is splattered in gore but looks otherwise undamaged; she wraps arms and legs around him, probable concussion taking precedence over dignity, and manages not to vomit as they rocket upwards. 

Tony takes her directly back to the helicarrier, where she is rushed immediately into quarantine. It is two hours before they let Steve in to see her.

“Did you get any of them out?” she asks. Quarantine is a square box of a room that has all the earmarks of having been a closet, with a fold-out cot. She's sitting cross-legged on the floor, her back to the wall, face to the door. Immune doesn't necessarily mean not contagious; they'll let her out when her skin closes. 

“No.” Steve sighs, and sits down next to her. “Well – no.”

She raises an eyebrow at him. He takes one of her hands in both of his and begins carefully cataloging every bruise and scrape, callused fingertips hot and gentle. 

Some time after he demonstrated that he could wipe the floor with her if and only if she happened to be threatening to kill herself at the time, he'd started this – touching her. He is not tactile by habit, especially not with women.

“A cat,” he says, sounding halfway between defiant and embarrassed.

“A cat,” Natasha repeats. “I think we have domesticated felines covered, as far as the biodiversity project.”

“Most of the scientists' pets are fixed, though.”

“And this one isn't?” 

“How do you even tell?” Steve asks her; he's stopped examining her hand, and is instead just holding it, loosely, on his knee; his thumb is stroking her palm. She doesn't think he knows he's doing it. 

“Scarring, I would suppose, in a female. It'd be rather more obvious in a male,” Natasha returns. 

“Yeah, I don't even know what this one is,” Steve admits. “Boy or girl. It was up in the rafters, so the hostiles couldn't get at it, but it kept trying to get back down – to where Tony'd last pinpointed those heat signatures. Like it wanted to get back to its people, but then they'd go for it, and -”

“-and it's a cat, and cats save themselves,” Natasha finishes. 

“Someone loved it enough to keep it alive this long,” he says. “To feed it, clean up after it – it can't have been easy.”

“So now you have a cat,” Natasha surmises, because she knows him, and she knows this cat isn't going to the lab to be kept in a comfortably appointed two-foot-square cage. Steve doesn't save things half-way.

“So now I have a cat.” He gives her a wry smile. 

She leans up and kisses him, and though they've never done this before, he kisses back without hesitation. She closes her eyes and still sees the dead, so she opens them again, and stands, and pulls him toward the cot.


End file.
